Search Abilities in Vista

Finding files in Vista is greatly enhanced. At this stage I don’t want to get into the technicaldetails of how it works yet I would like to focus on the results: You can find anything in Vistaand fast!

At first I found it odd that when I open the Start menu I can write directly into a searchbox. Slowly it grew on me.

When searching several options will narrow down the results you receive:

Prefixing the search with a(or several) criteria you want to use:size>10mb bigdocumentrating:<*** U2

The use of natural language (needs to be turned on by going to Organize>Folder and Search Options>Search[Tab]>Use natural language searchfiles created today

My first example includes tags (e.g. size,rating). These tags stem from the column heading in Explorer,to viewall of them simply right click a heading and choose the ‘More’ options from the list…

By default this should be working. Try to do the following:
Control Panel(Classic View)>Indexing Options>Advanced
Choose the ‘File Types’ tab.
On the list(Extension column),locate ‘contact’ and make sure that it is checked.

If this does not help you can try to rebuild the index by(this might take some time to complete as it deletes the old index and builds a new one):
Control Panel(Classic View)>Indexing Options>Advanced
Press the ‘Rebuild’ button.

Standard contacts are stored as files with the .contact extension in the users>[name]>Contacts folder.